Wagner’s project for the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth also established ‘the Bayreuth idea’, in which festival visitors were to participate directly in the performances. Initially, an explicit separation of art and politics anchored this separation, yet later ideologies came to influences the Bayreuth circle, and in turn, the Festival itself. Two are examined in this chapter, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (in relation to Cosima), and Adolf Hitler (in relation to Winifred), alongside the Festival in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The first of Wagner’s visits to London, in 1839, failed to secure the hoped-for performance of his Rule Britannia overture. He was also unable to meet Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, on whose Rienzi novel he had designs.

The second visit, in 1855, was made to conduct eight concerts for the Philharmonic Society, but Wagner fell foul of the conservative nature of the society’s programming, of old-fashioned performing practices in the country, and of the more reactionary members of the London press.

The third visit, in 1877, was intended to defray the deficit of the inaugural Bayreuth Festival with a series of concerts in the Royal Albert Hall. Economically the project misfired, but it sparked interest in his work among leading musicians, artists and intellectuals. It also helped pave the way for the surge of Wagnerism that would grip the arts in England at the close of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

This chapter addresses the political and intellectual context for Wagner’s revolutionary socialism. The nineteenth century stood in the light and shadow of the French Revolution, emboldened and fated to revisit and to relive many of its questions and practices. Wagner’s life mixed revolutionary theory and practice: in the Dresden uprising of 1849, but also in its ‘Vormärz’ prologue and in its apparently counter-revolutionary aftermath. Wagner experienced revolution on at least three geographical levels, European, German, and Saxon, the third receiving particular attention here. The focus is on Wagner’s most unambiguously revolutionary period, the 1840s and early 1850s, yet these ideas continued to play out in life, thought, and dramatic oeuvre: not only until completion of the Ring in 1874, Wagner’s revolutionary ‘fire cure’ reaching fulfilment in the final conflagration of Götterdämmerung, but in Parsifal and beyond. Earlier themes did not go unchanged; they provided shifting foundations for further dramatic exploration.

When Wagner was born in 1813, Germany did not exist. Saxony was part of Napoleon’s ‘Confederation of the Rhine’, a collection of puppet-states. By the time he died, the German Empire was the most powerful and prosperous state in continental Europe. This sensational transformation was marked by periodic domestic upheaval (the revolutions of 1830 and 1848–9), a demographic explosion, an industrial revolution and three victorious wars for Prussia (against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, and France in 1870). The accompanying political, social, and cultural changes were on a commensurate scale. Nationalism, liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and political Catholicism all emerged as mass movements, responding to radical changes in the public sphere driven by urbanisation, mass literacy and a communications revolution. By the time Wagner died in 1883, Germany had changed more than during the previous millennium.

Wagner’s early compositional training is seldom examined, perhaps because of his unambiguous claim in 1851 to be an autodidact, taught only by ‘life, art and myself’. Yet Wagner’s work with Christian Müller and particularly with Theodor Weilig on early works and in abstract skills (notably counterpoint) reveal various dependencies. Wanger’s shifting attitude towards this period of training sits alongside his choice of more public mentors, in Beethoven and Weber, whose works he studied and arranged.

Richard Wagner’s musical and prose works are shot through with ideas, imagery, and speculation relating to race. Given the influence of racial theorising on almost every area of nineteenth-century European thought and culture, this is hardly surprising. Yet Wagner did not just absorb theories of race: he actively disseminated them, a fact that remains a troubling, if unavoidable part of his legacy. This chapter provides a selective overview of the history of scientific racism in Europe (especially Germany) from the Enlightenment era to the early twentieth century, focusing on the intersections of racial theory with aesthetics, comparative philology, and religious ideologies, including antisemitism. Special attention is devoted to Arthur de Gobineau’s influence on Wagner’s late essays, and the impact of those writings on the Bayreuth Circle, including Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

This chapter argues that Wagner’s Schopenhauerian understanding of music reveals important aspects of video game music, particularly its erotic dimensions. Armed with, on the one hand, a Wagnerian-Schopenhauerian understanding of music, erotics, and metaphysics, and on the other Kulezic-Wilson’s erotics of cinematic listening, the chapter proposes a Wagnerian erotics of game music on three counts. First, music is an element of the video game medium that dissolves hard boundaries of a single ‘self’ of the player’s identity and takes players ‘out of themselves’. Secondly, games give musical voice to the will, and chart our interaction with it. Finally, games often use musical structures that arrest any broader sense of development, creating a temporal suspension and denial of the will that Wagner sought to reflect in his musical fabric. This chapter concludes with a brief case study that identifies these three elements – identity, the will, and temporality – in The Dig (1995).

Wagner’s immersion in the literary culture of Spain is seldom examined. This chapter explores his fascination with Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón in particular, as borne out by his private correspondence, public essays and via Cosima’s diaries. Here, Wagner’s personal characterisation of their literary value bears scrutiny as a facet of his self-understanding of drama within Opera and Drama, even if the role of Spanish culture within Wagner’s works is paltry. Canonical works such as Don Quixote testify to a shattering of the hero myth, the decadence of the ‘Christian romance of chivalry’, while the auto sacramantales of Calderón served as a counterpart to Parsifal, reversing its path from art to religion.

Wagner’s fascination with Indian literary culture followed a similar impulse from Schopenhauer, Friedrich Schlegel, and Karl Köppen, among others, as part of an ‘oriental renaissance’. The German construction of India, after William Jones’ pioneering work on Sanskrit Upanishads while in the East India Company, accrued around the promise of philological routes to the origins of world culture, demonstrating a primordial link between Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. It also offers a context for Wagner’s passion for Buddhism, as distinct from Vedic Hinduism, and the figure of the Buddha, most notable in Die Sieger and Parsifal, but also traceable in the Ring.

The complex relationship between Wagner and Liszt has been much caricatured. Liszt is usually perceived as long-suffering, patient, and generous in his support, while Wagner appears self-serving and ruthless. This chapter unravels how their relationship was shaped by contemporary economic, political, and, artistic forces. In doing so, it observes the contrasting ways Liszt and Wagner attempted to reconcile revolutionary republican sympathies with their desire for royal patronage. It examines the advice and practical support Liszt provided Wagner through his position as Kapellmeister at the Weimar Court Theatre, Liszt’s ambitions to position his relationship with Wagner as equivalent to Goethe and Schiller within a new artistic ‘golden age’ in Weimar, and their differing responses to contemporary aesthetic debates. It highlights similarities and differences in their ideas about the future of music, the relationship between music and drama and its implications for musical form, and their compositional approaches.

Since the arrival of Regietheater in opera, beginning in the 1970s, the possibilities, limits, and demands of stage directing in opera have been a topic of debate. Regietheater both maintains opera’s musical dramaturgy and radically questions, re-examines, and recontextualises the transmitted and ascertainable strata of meaning in the available texts (libretto, score, discourse on the staging history). By discussing some exemplary moments and striking characteristics of Regietheater productions of the Wagnerian repertoire (e.g., by Harry Kupfer, Peter Konwitschny, Katharina Wagner), the chapter argues that such productions are necessary for keeping the well-known repertoire alive. The chapter is not meant as an overview of current staging practices of the Wagnerian repertoire, nor as a best-of list for Regietheater productions; it is rather an attempt to highlight some of the possible effects of those productions.

After he fled the Dresden Uprising in May 1849, friends helped Wagner to settle in Zurich. He conducted the local orchestra and wrote copious essays about himself and the future of music and drama. Wagner returned to composition in 1853 with his Ring des Nibelungen, but set it aside in 1857 in favour of Tristan und Isolde, inspired by Mathilde Wesendonck, whose husband Otto had provided him with a new home next to their own. But private passion became public knowledge in 1858, forcing Wagner to abandon both Zurich and his marriage. By 1865 he was in Munich, funded by King Ludwig II. But Wagner meddled too much in the affairs of others and had to flee again. He found a new home in Tribschen outside Lucerne, where Cosima von Bülow joined him in 1868. They remained there until April 1872, when they moved to Bayreuth.

First mentioned in 1194, Bayreuth became the centre of the rule of the Margraves of Andechs-Merania. The city reached its Baroque heyday in the mid-eighteenth century under the regency of Margraves Friedrich and Wilhelmine, a sister of Friedrich II of Prussia (‘the Great’). After the loss of the margravial residence in 1769 and as a result of the Napoleonic Empire, the city lost its former importance and passes from Prussian to Bavarian rule. The poet Jean Paul (actually Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) lived in Bayreuth from 1804 until his death in 1825. With Richard Wagner’s move to Bayreuth in 1872, the construction of the Festspielhaus, and the founding of the Bayreuth Festival in 1876, the city in the Franconian province becomes the epitome of German culture with international significance and impact – but also a symbol of the ideological claim to Wagner by National Socialism and the Wagnerian Adolf Hitler.

Wagner and money is a cantus firmus of his biography. Notoriously broke, he is often regarded as a ‘pump genius’. He always demanded financial generosity from anyone who wanted to call themselves his friend. His pre-March criticism of capitalism has its origins in his completely underdeveloped economic mind. In King Ludwig II of Bavaria, he gained his most powerful and significant patron from 1864 onwards. But contrary to the widespread prejudice, it was by no means excessive sums that the king spent on Wagner. Moreover, in times without copyright and regulated royalty payments, artists were always dependent on patrons and gainful employment. Under today’s legal conditions, Wagner would have been a millionaire.

Richard Wagner’s approach to issues of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ includes the semantics of his musical style as well as his habit of assigning gender-specific traits to certain ideologies, such as nationalism. But the subject of women´s love is the main factor of his oeuvre. Women´s purpose in life lay in loving a man; aberrations turned evil (Ortrud in Lohengrin) or exuded sexual menace (Venus in Tannhäuser). His love affairs were closely related to his work, as the secret abbreviations in his draft of Die Walküre shows. He uses love as a means of redemption and salvation, but his erotic imagination was fascinated by the musical description of desire as in Tristan und Isolde. Women find their identity by finding a man, and they die when they have lost him. His music, however, is an authority able to break through the role of the woman as an appendage of the man.

Though Theodore Thomas had introduced Wagner’s music to America in 1861, following a ‘Grand Wagner Night’ in Boston in 1853, it was not until 1872 that Wagner rose to fame in America with a performance of ‘Ride of the Valkyries’. Thereafter Wagner’s music assumed a dominant place in American music and cultural life for the better part of the next four decades.

This chapter explores unusual facets of Wagner in relationship to America, including the heretofore unexamined influence on Wagner of writers such as Friedrich Gerstäcker, the German migration to America, Wagner in the Yiddish theatre, and Wagner’s views on America. For Wagner, America was the harbinger of modernity and represented a new frontier for his pioneering music dramas, which enabled an untutored mass audience to experience the intensity and spiritual claims in Wagner’s alluring realisation of drama with music. Wagner’s innovations in narration through sound would have the greatest influence through a novel modern medium – motion picture – and would define how music in the twentieth century became an indispensable instrument of mass entertainment within American film.